Nüvi

A diversion from my postings about the Cornerstone Festival to tell you about the Garmin Nüvi. This is a GPS unit and one of the coolest gadgets I own. (www.garmin.com/nuvi) I have the 350 model, as do N&V. It is about the size of a deck of cards and contains maps and listings for the entire US. In a nutshell, you look up where you want to go and it gets you there. It has voice prompts and text-to-speech, so not only do you get "turn right", you get "turn right on Main Street". We have our set on "Emily", the British voice.

So far, it has not steered us wrong. I used it to get to a couple golf courses and it literally gave me directions to the front door of the clubhouse. For the Cornerstone trip, it was awesome. It got us to every hotel, the drop off for Jeff (a tanning salon) and even found the festival. I'm not sure how I lived without it on long trips. It actually had a "shortcut" through a corn field -- still a "real" road - that saves us about 5 minutes going to the festival.

It will recalculate the route if you intentionally or unintentionally go off course. It does have an annoying habit of doing this when you get off for gas or food, but this could be handy if you wander a bit to find that pizza you are longing for.

My favorite feature is when you tell it to 'Go Home". It's like cheap insurance - wherever you are, you can always at least get home.